Even with the temperature near 80 degrees on the second day of the Wisconsin bow season, Mitch Stamm didn’t hesitate to go after his target buck. The incredibly wide-framed 8-point had been using his family’s 500-acre farm in the famed Buffalo County for several years. Stamm, a photographer by trade, had to work a wedding on opening day, but he found time to check his cameras after the event.
“The pics showed me he’d moved to another food plot and I knew I wanted to be there Sunday afternoon,” Stamm tells Outdoor Life. “I had him on camera the last 3 years. We let him walk twice in 2023 when he was a respectable eight-point, once when I was mentoring during the youth hunt and again on November 4 when I had him at 20 yards. I didn’t think he’d grow to what we saw this summer, it was the widest spread I’d ever seen on a buck. He had stickers in both 2023 and 2024, but was a clean eight this year.”
But with the southeast wind, Stamm knew he had to find an alternative stand to his preferred one.
“I went into an upwind enclosed 8-foot-high platform stand by a food plot about 4:30. It was really warm, it felt like a sauna inside there. I was going to put some cover over the windows, but didn’t have a chance. A doe and fawn came into the food plot and bedded down facing me 60 yards away. I’d wanted to practice drawing my bow since it was tight inside [the blind] with my camera set up there too, but I didn’t have a chance,” Stamm says. “There was constant deer movement all around me, both in the food plot and feeding on acorns.”
Stamm thought if the buck came out that evening, it would come from one specific corner of the plot.
“I looked that way many times, but when I looked at 7:10, there he was,” Stamm says. “I knew it was him right away. He started walking through the rye toward a mock scrape where I’d had pictures of him before. I was hoping he’d come to it again and he did, but the angle was bad from the confined space of the blind, so I had to move to a different window. That was challenging. Then I saw a small buck right below me. When “Two-Footer,” as we called him, saw him, that gave me a break. His attention was on the little buck now and by leaning to the side, I had a shot. The hit was a little more forward than I’d have liked, so I called some friends, and we took up the trail. There was good blood, even though the arrow hadn’t passed through. We found him about 175 yards away, I’d hit one lung, the arrow was buried in his opposite shoulder.”
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That was when the significance of the moment hit Stamm. “The adrenaline started pumping, I sat down to calm myself, it was pretty overwhelming,” Stamm said.
He estimated the buck weighed 215 pounds and it had a spread over two feet, at 25 ⅞ inches wide. It scored 166 3/8 inches total, which is a remarkable score for an 8-point. “It was the buck of a lifetime. I’ve been blessed.”
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